My guest for this show is Rana el Kaliouby. Rana is co-founder and CEO of Affectiva. At MIT, Rana spearheaded the applications of emotion-sensing and facial coding. She was recognized by Entrepreneur as one of the “7 Most Powerful Women To Watch In 2014”, inducted into the “Women in Engineering” Hall of Fame, and recipient of Technology Review’s “Top 35 Innovators Under 35” award.

Affectiva, as Rana puts it, “is on a mission to humanize technology by bringing in artificial emotional intelligence”. If you liked my conversation about Emotional AI with Pascale Fung from last year’s O’Reilly AI conference, you’re going to love this one. My conversation with Rana focuses on how her company is bringing Artificial Emotional Intelligence services to market. Rana and her team have developed a machine learning/computer vision platform that can use the camera on any device to read your facial expressions in real time, then maps it to an emotional state.

Using data science to mine the world’s largest emotion repository, Affectiva has collected over 5.5 million pieces of emotional expression data to date, from laptop, driving, cellular interactions. Understanding the importance of personal privacy, Rana and her Co-Founder Rosalind Wright Picard have vowed to shy away from partnerships that would subject consumers to unknowing surveillance, a commendable effort.

Contest Update

Thank everyone who’s taken the time to enter our AI Conference giveaway. We’ve got a couple of exciting updates for those of you who want in on this opportunity. First, we’re making it even easier to enter our ticket giveaway for the San Francisco event! Second, we’re giving away two tickets now, not one! To enter the contest in 30 seconds or less just hit pause now and visit twimlai.com/aisf right from your phone!

Thanks to Our Sponsor

A big thank you to Intel Nervana, who is supporting this podcast series. I’m very grateful to them for helping make this series possible, and I’m excited about the cool stuff they launched at the O’Reilly AI conference, including the Neon framework and Nervana Graph announcements. Be sure to check them out at intelnervana.com, and let them know via Twitter @IntelNervana how much you appreciate their support of the podcast.